Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise France’s retirement age cleared a final hurdle on Friday after the highest constitutional authority validated most of the draft law, marking a political victory for the president after months of protests over his unpopular reform.
Armed police officers had cordoned off a large security zone outside the constitutional council building at Palais Royal in advance of the highly anticipated verdict, while labour unions and student groups held scattered protests in Paris, Toulouse, Lyon and elsewhere.
France’s nine-member constitutional council ruled that most of the proposed law, whose central measure is to raise the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64, was valid under the constitution and enacted legally.
Mr Macron and his embattled prime minister Élisabeth Borne will now aim to turn the page on a difficult period that saw millions of people turn out to protests and strikes against their plan to shore up the finances of France’s costly and complex pensions system.
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The council rejected six aspects of the law that it said did not belong in a budget bill, including a so-called “senior” index to measure companies’ progress on keeping older people in the workforce.
It also rejected arguments by the opposition that the government had abused parliamentary procedure by adding the reform to a social security budget bill in order to shorten debate, and by overriding lawmakers to pass it without a vote using the so-called 49.3 clause of the constitution.
“Although the measures related to the pensions reform ... could have been introduced as an ordinary law, the government’s choice to embed them as an addendum to the (social security law) is not in itself a breach of any constitutional obligation,” said the constitutional council on Friday.
Ms Borne sought to draw a line under the fight and appeared to call for calm, saying there were “no winners nor losers” in light of the ruling.
“The law has reached the end of its democratic process,” she said in a tweet. But some opponents of the pensions law have vowed to fight on, including by trying to force a referendum on the matter.
The government has already sought to placate labour unions by offering new talks over a separate set of proposals to improve working conditions and pay. Mr Macron has invited them to a meeting at the Elysée palace on Tuesday.
But the group of eight labour unions leading the protests have not backed down, and again called on Macron to withdraw the reform. They called for a large turnout to the traditional march for Labor Day on May 1 to fight “the unjust pensions reform”.
“Our spirit is one of combat and determination,” Sophie Binet, head of the hard-left CGT union, told daily newspaper Le Monde on Friday.
Left-wing opposition parties have also been trying another long-shot route to block the pensions law by applying to the constitutional council to be able to collect signatures needed to hold a referendum on raising the retirement age. But their first attempt to do so was rejected on Friday.
Two additional motions to that end have been filed, but no referendum of this type has succeeded since they were created in a constitutional reform in 2008.
Far-left parliamentary leader Mathilde Panot vowed to continue fighting the reform. “The blockage of the country will remain total after this decision,” she told the National Assembly.
Far-right leader Marine Le Pen said the adoption of the pensions reform “marked the definitive break between the French people and Emmanuel Macron” and promised to repeal the measure if she took power.
The pensions protests – which began in January with strikes that paralysed oil refineries, disrupted trains and schools and caused nuclear power reactors to lower their output – took a more intense turn in mid-March when the reform was pushed through parliament.
Mr Macron’s government subsequently survived two votes of no confidence filed by opposition lawmakers. But marches and walkouts organised by the unions gave way to more spontaneous nightly demonstrations and clashes with police in cities like Paris and Bordeaux, as protesters set fire to piles of uncollected garbage.
The protests also turned the spotlight on to heavy handed tactics used by police. The spiralling pushback prompted the Elysée to postpone a state visit from King Charles III in March and became a political crisis for Macron.
Some of the clashes have since dissipated, and turnout for the labour-led marches and strikes has shrunk in recent weeks, fuelling the government’s hopes that they could wait out the anger.
– Additional reporting by Sarah White
- Copyright the Financial Times Limited 2023